1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of network computing and in particular to an email transaction system for determining a time period, based on geographical variables, in which to send an email to a plurality of email addresses identified within a distribution list within a high volume email transaction system.
2. Background Art
Many organisations use emailing systems for their internal and external communications. Often, emails are used to communicate organisational changes, up and coming events, or news items etc, to many different people throughout the organisation. In many organisations this can often mean sending email communications to employees located in a different country or in a different time zone.
Sending an email to a large number of people can have a severe impact on the network and the mailing servers that are required to receive and process the emails. In a busy organisation, email servers are constantly bombarded with one email after another. At certain times of the day, an email server may experience a higher volume of network traffic than at other times of the day. For example, at lunchtime on a Friday, more people may send emails as they prepare for the weekend break, or as a new advertising campaign is launched, the marketing director may wish to send out an email via a distribution list, informing customers of an imminent launch.
Therefore the work patterns of employees at certain times of the day, weeks or months may affect the ability of many networks and mail servers to handle the increased network traffic. In most email client applications, when sending an email, the sender can select a number of delivery options, for example, high priority, medium priority or low priority. By selecting low priority, this will allow the email to be sent to the sender's mail server and the senders mail server will ‘hold’ the email until such a time that the organisations deems that it is appropriate to send the email. For example, after 19:00 hours. This provides an advantage in that an organisation may balance the amount of emails that are sent at peak times of the day. Some organisations may even edict that no emails may be sent to a distribution list larger than, for example, 100 recipients in normal working hours. Often individuals may overcome this problem by separating out the distribution list into smaller distribution lists, for example, in multiples of twenty, in order to communicate urgent emails.
A further problem occurs when sending an email to recipients in a distribution list that are resident in different countries or within different time zones. For example, when sending an email within off-peak hours (20:00 hours to 7:00 hours) from a mail server located within the UK to a number of recipients who are located in Australia; the time at which the email is received for processing by the recipients email server in Australia may be determined as peak time. This therefore creates a further burden on the network and mail servers at the recipient's location.
Mailing systems are often designed depending on the organisations needs. Typically, such systems may comprise a singular machine implementation or a multiple machine implementation. In a single machine implementation the hardware and software installed on the single mailing server may prevent the mailing system from quickly and efficiently handling a large distribution list. For example, due to limitations in processing capacity, disk space and the operating system. Also, limitations may exist in the number of entries within the distribution list which may be processed by the mailing software.
To overcome the limitations of a single machine implementation, multiple machine implementations are used in order to speed up the process of partitioning a distribution list into smaller lists for processing by many other servers. This type of arrangement requires a substantial manual effort in deciding the most appropriate manner in which to partition a distribution list and further determining which servers should process the partitioned distribution list. Both single and multiple machine implementations are inefficient and are unable to manage increases in network traffic, bounced email and fluctuations in activity levels of emails received by the mailing servers.
US patent application, publication number US 2002/0026484 A1, describes method and system for processing a high volume of electronic mail. The method and system employs several groups of servers in order to more efficiently handle the processing and transmission of messages to large numbers of recipients. The groups of servers are categorised as A and B servers. The A servers provide storage for databases containing electronic mailing lists. The B servers, employed under the control of the A servers, perform the mass delivery of the electronic mail messages. A list is identified of available servers. For each server within the list, the system checks to see if it has already allocated processes and started delivery through these servers. If this has not occurred, the system attempts to allocate processes by contacting a remote server and attempting to reserve as many resources as possible.
Further, US 2002/0026484 A1 calculates the shortest path to a destination mail server using performance information derived from a network PING and a trace route to calculate the number of network hops. It then recalculates this on an on-going basis to modify its mail processing dynamically and only uses the information to select a set of sending servers which are closest to the recipient's servers.
US patent application, publication number US 2002/0026484 A1 does not solve the problem of a number of mail servers interacting within a collaborative nature, i.e. multiple mail systems wishing to transmit high volumes of email in a collaborative way and therefore two mail servers could flood the same destination mail servers with a large number of emails.
Therefore there is a need within the prior art for a method and system to alleviate the aforementioned problems.